Put dCore on a diet?

[PDP-8]

I'm looking through dCore Bionic (well, the test uefi version) and see things that I don't need from the standard install, and wonder if these would be good candidates for pulling out:

gnome-terminal
ubuntu-mono
adwaita icons / themes
etc..

Not a big deal, but I figure things like these would get pulled in by those who go online and actually need them.

For example, even though I don't need gnome-terminal at all, trying to fire it up is just a lockup from what appears to be a larger missing gnome environment.

Dunno - a few K here and there tends to add up - and overall less bandwidth pull on the distro servers and mirrors ...

Unless for some reason things like ubuntu-mono are actually necessary for the base release somehow?

[Juanito]

For example, even though I don't need gnome-terminal at all, trying to fire it up is just a lockup from what appears to be a larger missing gnome environment.

gnome-terminal will not run if a locale is not set - might that be the problem?

[PDP-8]

I'm sure that will fix it.

I'm thinking along the line of a basic install, where the user doesn't *really* need gnome-terminal to be functional- so why include it?  If they need it go online and get it.  Or lxterm.  Or rxvt.

I'm not complaining - just a suggestion to avoid creeping featurism.  Peanut-gallery comments.

[PDP-8]

I think I see what's going on here in regards to locale's and gnome-terminal (which I don't need).

Even though I have set my locale in 3 places (en_US.UTF-8) in

1) grub.cfg kernel line
2) exported in my .profile as LANG
3) exported in my .profile as a fallback with LANGUAGE

(and seen as accepted by the colorful boot stanza)

Upon reboot, gnome-terminal - and in fact xterm when fed with invalid font choices on purpose - throws locale errors, means that I have to go online to get the package to generate locales first.  And gnome-terminal still bombs out, despite en_US.UTF-8 being set.

What appears to be the case is that if a user desires to grab the gnome-terminal package on her own, she would be pulling down the entire gnome desktop, or a large amount of unwanted material as an Ubuntu meta desktop package.

dCore's gnome-terminal seems to be cherry-picked to only require the user to go online and get the locales utility to get it to work - and not pull down the entire desktop.

Other things, like the adwaita icons and perhaps even ubuntu.mono may be an attempt to support gnome-terminal too.

I don't know - since it doesn't work without having to go online to generate locales, and dCore is already at 365mb, heck why not just make it work out of the box (for xterm too!) by making the distribution 370mb?  I mean, at this point what's the concern about size?  Put locales in there so it works out of the box.

Maybe dump things like the bsd utils, or something else to compensate that can be picked up if someone truly wants it by going online?

Not mad, just puzzling since I don't need gnome-terminal at all, but to each his own.

[Jason W]

Below is the list file that dCorePlus-bionic.sce is made from, and that sce is the difference between dCorePlus-bionic and dCore-bionic isos. 

Code: [Select]

tce-setdrive
xorg-all
wireless
flwm_topside
b43-fwcutter
dosfstools
iw
wireless-4.14.10-tinycore
ndiswrapper-modules-4.14.10-tinycore
aterm
ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Packages like gnome-terminal and ubuntu-mono are being pulled in as dependencies of things in that list.   The total uncompressed size of dCorePlus-bionic.sce is 768M.  297M of it is the /lib/firmware directory.  I did create a PKGEXCLUDELISTCUSTOM file in /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/import/debinx/ that contains the below:

Code: [Select]

kde4
kde3
kde-full
gnome
gnome-terminal
ubuntu-mono
adwaita-icon-theme-full
adwaita-icon-theme
gcc-7-base
cpp-7
cpp

The original size of dCorePlus-bionic.sce was 312MB.  Re-importing using that exclude list brought it down to 255MB.  That is a bit of size savings.  I don't have time to test boot the results tonight but excluding such packages could save a bit of space and make dCorePlus more in line with what the intended package set is to be. 

gnome-terminal imported on it's own creates a 91MB sce.

What is the package name of the locales utility you mention?  I usually don't use locales.

Oh, and PDP-8, if you want to help further trim unneeded packages from dCorePlus by means of an exclude list, that would be helpful.  As the only purpose of dCorePlus is to boot into a graphical environment and set up wireless networking so one can start importing their chosen packages and set the system up from there.

[PDP-8]

Gotcha.  Sorry to sound kinda gruff about it.

It's only because I bounce between two worlds which have different outlooks, yet are from the same family - TC and dCore.  Easy to get their purpose mixed up.

Like, I'll put the busybox directory at the start of my path in front in dCore, so bashism's in the shell aren't a problem when developing on TC or dCore and sharing between the two.

I'm biased because I primarily use TC and dCore offline as-is, leaving the heavy lifting of multimedia to other devices.  *core is fun enough out of the box offline - but that's me.

So my first hypocritical request would be to consider putting gdisk and / or gParted into the standard uefi test image release!

Remember - you're talking to a guy who used Coherent for years, and had no uucp access - so "online" meant having books or other data by my side...  maybe that's the problem.

<.. running and ducking ... >